"Rouault’s Miserere: a Meditation on Suffering and Hope"

(Lecture about French Artist Georges Rouault)

Thursday, Oct 27th 2011

7:30pm - 9:00pm

Hallie Ford Museum of Art

Free

Dr. Soo Yun Kang, Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Design, Chicago State University

Dr. Soo Yun Kang will speak about Miserere, a print album of 1922-27, which is undoubtedly a landmark production of the French painter and graphic artist Georges Rouault, who relayed his deepest thoughts and beliefs through the representations of the poor, bourgeois, soldiers, landscapes and Christ. These images do not follow any logical sequence and are dispersed throughout the book. Christ who is depicted the most and shown largely in the moments of Passion, however, intermittently appear in this book, as if to dialogue with the other figures and scenes. He is the key to the album, which declares Christ as the ultimate bearer of all the sufferings and sins of the humanity as well as their source of hope through the very enactment of Passion. This book reflects the various thoughts of the artist in regard to human suffering and hope in Christ, conceived in response to the death of his father in 1912 as well as to WWI. The book is a modern Psalter, with adorations, invocations, intercessions, and affirmations, as expressed visually by the artist.